Future Risks Quotes

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.

Our nation counts on us to have the expertise and the insight to flag the risks and the opportunities that lie ahead, and to keep our eye on all the critical international concerns that face our nation right now.

Americans are worried about pollution - oil trains running through their towns, fracking in their neighborhoods, coal dust in their air. They're worried about what the future will look like for their children if carbon pollution continues unchecked.

Science fiction has done a really good job of scaring us into thinking that computers shouldn't get too smart, because as soon as they get really smart, they're going to take over the world and kill us, or something like that. But why would they do that?

Personally, I'm not afraid of a robot uprising. The benefits far outweigh the threats.

As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.

Once we no longer have the intellectual upper hand, then we quite literally, by definition, cannot outwit our successors. So unless we are absolutely sure that the machines we are building right now are not going to eventually become our new robot overlords, prudence is called for.

We have this yearning to know the answers to the big questions about space and why we're here; we can't evolve fast enough to figure these answers out on our own, but we can do it through artificial intelligence. But there's also some very scary downsides that could come if we don't put the right safety precautions in there.

What good is it to continue to focus on the exterior technological wonders before us - from indefinite life extension to computer/mind interlinks to unlimited zero-point energy to worm-hole intergalactic space travel - if all we carry with us is an egocentric red-mem Nazis and KKK? Do we really want Jack the Ripper living 400 years, zipping around the country in his hypercar, unleashing misogynistic nanorobots? Exterior developments are clearly a concern; how much more so are interior developments - or lack there of.

I suppose I'm intrigued with the bad traits of society, because I'm a part of society, and the bad traits pose the dangerous questions for our future.

As we get robots becoming more sophisticated, I think we should worry sooner rather than later on how much they could take over, but I think it'll mostly be a positive thing. In terms of deadlines it won't be any worse than nuclear weapons.

Reducing future risks requires paying some immediate costs.

One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that. I'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime. Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us.

If we say yes to something we believe is wrong now, what guarantee is there that the wrong will not be further exacerbated down the line?

The present gives you the opportunity to dive deep into the water of life, or to fly high into the sky of life. But on both the sides there are dangers - 'past' and ´future´ are the most dangerous words in human language.

Yet, our achievements also mask many continuing failings and seem to expose more future dangers.

Politically speaking, it's always easier to shell out money for a disaster that has already happened, with clearly identifiable victims, than to invest money in protecting against something that may or may not happen in the future.

Not to dream more boldly may turn out to be, in view of present realities, simply irresponsible.

Our goal is to work against things we have not seen that we will see in the near future.

Artificial Intelligence is one of those areas where we should be proactive in controlling it rather than reactive. If we are reactive, by the time we will do the necessary things, it will be too late. Robots can do everything better than we [humans] can.

The impacts of climate change are not going to get better; they are going to get worse.